At lunchtime yesterday, I heard there were going to be 39 major protests around the country, all of which could lead, potentially, to violence and riots. Crikey, I thought that's a very big number.
By the time I left here last night, at eight o'clock, we were told there could be up to 100 of these major protests, with up to 30 planned counter protests going to take place across the country and Britain was literally battening down the hatches.
There were market towns in England where GP appointments have been cancelled all afternoon.
Hospitals have been reducing their services. Retailers were closing shops, spending money on wood and boarding up their premises.
Nigel Farage
GB NEWS
And then what happened? Well, not really very much at all.
And it kind of turns out that there was a post on a Telegram group saying, ‘it's time to mask up and go out there and do your stuff’.
Ricky Jones joined other protesters in WalthamstowTWITTERIt turned out that organisations that call themselves anti-fascist groups were very mobilised and organised with their printed banners, and they turned up in big numbers in Walthamstow and, I think in Brighton and many other parts of the country too.
And think about it really; one of the biggest policing operations we've ever seen.
Goodness knows what the cost of this whole thing was. Was it some gigantic, enormous, expensive hoax?
But it's funny. If you looked at the media today, especially the BBC, you would have thought, well, it's absolutely marvellous, isn't it, that all these wonderful people have come out onto the streets to stop this beastly behaviour that we've seen over the last week.
And I have no doubt the vast majority of those that did turn out on the so-called counter protests genuinely wanted to see peace, law and order and decency returned on our streets.
But what I've learned very much to my cost over the years is that those people, the ‘be kind’ brigade, aren't always quite as kind as you may think.
I'm pleased to say [Ricky Jones] has now been removed as a Labour councillor and subsequently arrested.
Despite the horrible things that he said, there was big applause from the crowd and [chants of] ‘free, free Palestine’. What the hell has ‘free, free Palestine’ got to do with the events of this week?